Once an AC/DC roadie, Taylor found God and became a star preacher at his LA church. Now he has been asked to leave – and many of his flock will go with him

The historic church of All Saints’, Beverly Hills, on a prime residential street near the luxury shopping hub of Rodeo Drive, is not a place you would expect to find a British former heavy metal roadie as associate rector. But that is the role Barry Taylor, once dubbed “the screaming skull” for his gaunt visage, has played for the past 10 years.

Not any more. The normally staid world of Californian Episcopalians has been turned upside down by a row over collection plates and preaching styles that led the Los Angeles branch of the church to hand the city’s most eccentric priest his cards. Urged on by his many celebrity supporters, Taylor has now set up a rival service at a temporary Sunday venue at a rented Lutheran church. The west coast religious establishment has never seen anything quite like it.

Taylor’s extraordinary journey from star roadie to priest began with his conversion to Christianity on the Highway to Hell tour, AC/DC’s aptly named sex-, booze- and drug-fuelled trip to the US in 1979. He enrolled in a seminary to become a priest, with a PhD in pop culture and theology.

“Let’s say that tour is where my epiphany began,” says Taylor, who would sit in the tour bus scribbling notes into a bible and reading philosophy while taking cocaine. He is speaking to the Observer at a cafe in Santa Monica, a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean on the other side of town, where Taylor now lives. It’s a long way from Cambridgeshire, where he grew up and went to grammar school before a friend introduced him to the 1970s music scene and he became a roadie to rock ’n’ roll celebrities, including the Bay City Rollers. Following his conversion, Taylor went to various churches, got married and divorced, and formed his own alternative place of worship in LA, which he named “Sanctuary”. Services featured Taylor on guitar with his band Wonderland and sermons that referenced the Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and Bob Dylan.